Book Review: I'm Down

Well, it took me two months to finish Empire Falls and two days to finish, I'm Down by Mishna Wolff. I love memoirs & have been wanting to read this one for awhile. Here is the synopsis:

Wolff details her childhood growing up in an all-black Seattle neighborhood with a white father who wanted to be black in this amusing memoir. Wolff never quite fit in with the neighborhood kids, despite her father's urgings that she make friends with the sisters on the block. Her father was raised in a similar neighborhood and—after a brief stint as a hippie in Vermont—returned to Seattle and settled into life as a self-proclaimed black man. Wolff and her younger, more outgoing sister, Anora, are taught to embrace all things black, just like their father and his string of black girlfriends. Just as Wolff finds her footing in the local elementary school (after having mastered the art of capping: think yo mama jokes), her mother, recently divorced from her father and living as a Buddhist, decides to enroll Wolff in the Individual Progress Program, a school for gifted children. Once again, Wolff finds herself the outcast among the wealthy white kids who own horses and take lavish vacations. While Wolff is adept at balancing humorous memories with more poignant moments of a daughter trying to earn her father's admiration, the result is more a series of vignettes than a cohesive memoir.

I love reading about other people's lives & liked this book. However, it wasn't very funny. I felt bad for Mishna throughout the entire book. She was blamed for everything, told she wasn't good enough, forced to do the sports that her father wanted her to do, and never really cared for that well. Erik and I were talking about how we grew up & we were never really forced to do anything. The cabinets were overflowing with food. We didn't really have to worry about a lot.

I thought this book was interesting to see how the white family tried to fit into a black community. They weren't black enough to fit in but when it was Mishna's turn to fit into a white school, she didn't quite fit there either. I recommend this book, just don't look for a ton of laughs.

If you are looking for a funny memoir, I highly recommend my favorite: Dark at the Roots by Sarah Thyre. Very funny.